Today the House passed HR 2419, the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, better known as the Farm Bill.  I was one of 106 who voted against the bill, I want to take a moment to let you know exactly what this bill does….all 673 pages of it.

Since 1933, Congress has passed some version of a Farm Bill every couple of years.  Unfortunately, all too often U.S. Farm Bills fail to consider the real needs of a responsible Agriculture policy.  The real problem impacting farmers is not persistent poverty, but rather normal yearly income fluctuations.  Below you will find several reasons why this is the wrong direction for Farm policy in America.

• This bill continues to subsidize wealthy farmers.  All farmer income tests are rejected by this farm bill and affluent will still remain eligible for permanent subsidies.  Most of these subsidies will go into large agribusiness interests.
• This Farm Bill waives the Democrat PAYGO rule, which requires any bill affecting mandatory spending or revenue to be deficit neutral. This conference agreement increases spending by $10 billion over the next decade, and $10 billion in gimmicks are also included.  Not to mention, this Farm Bill uses the spending from 2007, which allows for more spending than that of the 2008.
• The measure ignores the plight of consumers facing skyrocketing food prices by making a bad sugar program worse. Due to the current policy, sugar prices in the U.S. are twice the worldwide average and cost consumers nearly $1.8 billion last year, according to the GAO]. This Farm Bill will worsen this situation by increasing the sugar loan rate, and by creating a new sugar-to-ethanol mandate that will purchase sugar at inflated prices and sell it to ethanol producers at a substantial discount. This sweet deal for sugar producers will leave a sour taste in the mouths of American taxpayers.
• This Farm Bill creates a new, $3.8-billion Permanent Disaster Relief Program that disproportionately assists those with political clout, not real needs. This duplicates at least three existing crop insurance programs, along with other subsidy programs. This new program also creates incentives for the use of marginal lands that would otherwise not be farmed. To make matters worse, the cost of the program is likely to be double this amount due to a funding cliff that makes a “permanent” program disappear after only 5 years.
• The Farm Bill contains numerous wasteful earmarks. These include a $250-million earmark for land in Montana, an earmark that requires the USDA Forest Service to sell land to a ski resort, and a $170-million earmark for the salmon industry in San Francisco.
• The true cost of the Farm Bill is much higher than the advertised by the conferees. PAYGO gimmickry and special interest tax breaks and earmarks not contemplated within the advertized $10-billion framework push the overall cost to $23 billion over what the current Farm Bill pays for. 

Awww: Just because they're cute doesn't make them endangered.

The Secretary was compelled to make a listing he clearly didn't want to make and that comes with all sorts of foreseeable detrimental consequences of exactly the sort I describe in my book.  In an effort to obviate those consequences, the Secretary has attempted to erect some barriers that will have all the legislative strength of tissue paper.  It will take just a few seconds of a new administration to blow through them and bring about the dire consequences Sec. Kempthorne has obviously foreseen.  The ESA needs to be reformed for all sorts of reasons that I discuss in the book, but this is perhaps the most urgent now. 

Kempthorne said, “Listing the polar bear as threatened can reduce avoidable losses of polar bears. But it should not open the door to use of the ESA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, power plants, and other sources.”

To prevent the environmental lobby from using this listing as a means to prevent domestic energy development Kempthorne proposed a rule to allow this type of activity in the area if it is permissible under standards dictated by the Mammal Protection Act.

This rule has not been adopted.

The first is the possible wide geographic reach of the global warming argument. The snail darter almost killed a single dam. The polar bear could, in theory at least, stop everything.

Suppose someone wants to build a coal-burning power plant in Florida. Environmentalists might challenge the construction on the grounds that the plant will emit greenhouse gases leading to global warming and an increased threat to polar bears.

An October 2007 NASA study concluded that changing wind patterns are responsible for sea ice loss. New wind patterns have compressed sea ice and moved it into the Transpolar Drift Stream which has taken the ice to lower latitudes where it has melted.

The classification would open the door for environmentalists to challenge any new forms of energy production -- including oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) or new power plants and factories that emit fossil fuels. It also would jeopardize a highly promising arrangement in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea, which contains an estimated 15 billion barrels of oil and 76 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Now is not the time to cut back on domestic oil production. With gas prices soaring to nearly $4 per gallon in some parts of the country, there’s hardly been a better time to embark on energy exploration in the United States to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

At present, polar bear populations are robust and, according to native people, are considerably larger than they were in previous decades.[29] Predictions of polar bear endangerment are based on two sets of computer models: one set predicts how much Arctic sea ice will melt as a result of global warming, and the other predicts how polar bear populations will respond. But computer models of climate are known to be fraught with problems, and the ecological models used to predict polar bear response are equally limited.

"I'm gonna tell you something, folks, when it comes to global warming and the hoax and the fixes for this hoax, the solution, we do not have one of the three presidential candidates who differs from each other.  We are cooked.  Our goose is cooked on this.  It doesn't matter who you vote for, for president, we're going to get a liberal Democrat approach to fixing something that doesn't exist. 

... I have not faced this situation before.  I have not faced a situation where a major Republican presidential candidate sounds just like a liberal Democrat and I know of no other thing to do here than to tell you the truth about this.  This is embarrassing, and it is frightening."

"Ending the tax subsidy should be easy. Ending the mandate will be tougher, though some members of Congress are showing buyer’s remorse. One reason is the worldwide spike in food prices. That has been driven largely by a huge increase in demand and rising energy costs. The diversion of American corn from food to fuel — about one-fourth of the crop — has not helped."

Our free-market economy is built on profit. Higher profits mean more jobs, higher incomes, more investment in equipment and people, higher standards of living. Yes, profits are the engine for all of this — and that includes the profits of "Big Oil."

By signaling that supply is scarce, higher profits encourage more production. Except, that is, when Congress through its inept lawmaking stands in the way. And that's the case now with the oil industry.

What's more:

Truth is, oil industry profits are in line with the rest of American industry. In 2007, a record year, they earned 8.3 cents per dollar of sales. Beverage companies and cigarette makers, by contrast, earned 19.1 cents. Drug makers, 18.4 cents. Indeed, all manufacturers, 8.9 cents on average, made more than "Big Oil."

Besides, we've tried windfall profits taxes before, in the early 1980s, and they were an utter failure.  . . .

Remember: Oil companies don't really pay "windfall profit" taxes, anyway. You do.

There's much more.  The whole thing is a must-read.

            If Congressional Republicans allow Nancy Pelosi and her Democrats to skirt responsibility for rising gas prices, they will once again earn the time-honored mantle of “The Stupid Party.”  Two years ago this week, Nancy Pelosi – as part of a concerted campaign of opportunistic mendacity – said she and her party had a “commonsense plan to help bring down skyrocketing gas prices.”   Their "plan" conveniently came to fruition after Democrats voted against a comprehensive energy plan that would increase fuel production and open up untapped oil reserves.

            Democrats won control of Congress partly because of such promises.  The day she took over as speaker, the average price of a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline was $2.33.  Today, it’s $3.60.  This $1.27 “Pelosi Premium” is the single most pernicious factor behind the struggling economy in general and middle class anxiety.  Recent polls demonstrate rising gas prices are the most important economic issue facing Americans today.  And here’s the thing: it’s all their fault.

            The spiraling cost of energy in the United States today is not one of those things that is nobody’s fault, nor is it a matter of shared responsibility.  The fault is absolutely, completely at the doorstep of the Democrat Party.  Their Kool-Aid-cult attachment to environmental extremism, their ideological hostility to free markets and free trade, their barking threats of tax hikes on American energy production, their weak and indecisive foreign policy toward the Middle East, and their limousine-liberal NIMBY hypocrisy are not present on both sides of the aisle. 

            To date, the only thing Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats have tried to do on energy is raise taxes.  The tax hike they passed in the House not only targets American energy companies, it specifically exempts foreign oil companies.  So, foreign energy companies, many of them subsidized by regimes hostile to the United States, would enjoy a reverse subsidy benefit from the Democrat Congress.  Is that really their “commonsense plan”? 

            Nobody knows.  All we know, for sure, is what the plan is not.  The Democrats’ plan to lower gas prices cannot include opening up the billions of gallons of oil underneath the Gulf of Mexico or Alaska because… well, because the Democrats apparently care more about caribou, fish, and even the views from their vacation homes than energy independence.  There is enough accessible oil in the United States to fuel 60 million cars for 60 years, and the Democrats will not allow it to be drilled. 

            This week, truckers rallied in Washington, D.C. to protest the failure of Congress to do anything about gas prices.  They were mad; they should be.  They should be furious at the arrogant refusal of Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats to lift a finger to lower gas prices.  They won’t allow increased production, they won’t allow the creation of new nuclear power plants, they refuse to reform our ethanol subsidy programs, which are not only driving up the cost and driving down the efficiency of our gasoline, but are now helping to starve the third world.

            If we wanted to, we could lower the price of fuel in a month – by opening up our oil reserves to exploration, by encouraging the development of next-generation nuclear power plants, and by removing government mandated manipulation of the energy market.  But Democrats oppose all of these measures for reasons ranging from partisan cynicism to ideological fanaticism.  But they maintain they have a “commonsense plan.”  Well, what is it?

            Voters have a right to know what exactly Mrs. Pelosi’s “commonsense plan” entails.  Her number is 202-225-0100.  Call your Congressman and Senator, ask the Democrats what their plan is to reduce the price of gasoline.  If they don’t give you a straight answer, if they don’t renounce tax hikes, if they don’t support increased domestic production, and if they feed you some nonsense about “biofuels,” you’ll know all you’ll need to.

            Energy prices are bankrupting the middle class, and the Democrats in Congress are doing nothing about it.  The real question now is: will conservatives do something about that?